BATSHIT TIMES probes how this current moment feels so unlike what’s come before. We all experience unfamiliar anxieties surrounding technologies, democracy, geopolitics, climate change, economics, etc. I’m curious how you’re using the internet and Instagram in particular to sort through the zeitgeist, how it becomes a collaborative site with other users, and how that is similar to your creative and art direction roles of researching and archiving images and information?

At Christmas, my sister and I were talking about work, and she told me, “Instagram is basically the perfect thing for you.” And it's true. Instagram is everything that I need as a tool. Since I was very young, I've wanted to collect and show things, to look at images and see what's cool and what's not. My mom would drop us off at the library when I was around six or seven years old, back in the 1980s, and I would look at pictures in books for hours and hours. Reading was one thing, but looking at images was something else, and by age eleven, I was making films and publishing little magazines.

What’s amazing to me about Instagram is its potential for information distribution. I love magazines, but compared to Instagram, they’re basically a very heavy-handed, lengthy, expensive way of talking about and showing things. I treat Instagram like a neo-magazine, a broadcasting-publishing platform. My Instagram account is like a magazine in 2022. That's all it is. I would have loved when I was younger to put stuff out with the rapidity and the style that we do now. In today’s Internet age, technology has finally caught up with intention and interaction. 

When I was making magazines back in the ‘90s and 2000s, I’d publish letters to the editor sent by my readers. Now I speak to around two hundred people each day, and I can screenshot those conversations and post them to my Instagram account, and that acts as an amazing letters page. I remember how Vice had amazing letters pages that were so funny because they included plenty of inside-jokes, and some staff writers used pen names to make up some of the letters. This invited a level of criticism into the magazine where the public could discuss culture, and of course some of those letter writers eventually became staff writers themselves. 

Now I can do something similar, but at a much faster rate, interacting with thousands of people, and reaching an audience of half a million people per month. And the bar to use Instagram as a magazine is much lower than publishing one physically. There’s a time investment, but there’s no financial investment and little risk. Back then, it’d cost us like £10,000 to publish an issue of a magazine, but now it costs me nothing to post on Instagram. 

I’m now capable of doing things beyond curating because I'm creating content as well. I wonder, what's the distinction between an image I've created, something I've said with an image I found, or a joke someone else made? All of these things get placed on the same level and I get to say, “Here, this is my worldview, enjoy this stuff.” Here’s some dystopian news, some sex and violence, some humour and weird shit. Like a girl eating a lightbulb. I can use the design and functions of this platform to create a feeling that resonates inside me and my followers. I love that feeling and I like creating it. And we are all capable of doing this in various ways. We can all show off our own worldviews.

I love the @batshit.times Instagram account because it acts as a second magazine, like a zine you get for free or a niche news bulletin with a specific attitude.

Instagram censorship is one of the through-lines with artists featured in BATSHIT TIMES — a lot of their work is taken down by the platform. A while back, you trained a GAN to generate human faces out of images of meat, and Instagram removed this artwork after a few days. A lot of people found it humorous that Instagram’s AI couldn’t recognize that these images didn’t depict actual violence or gore, but were literally the non-real creation of a different AI. This project really revealed the shortcomings of the technology that moderates Instagram. What are your current thoughts on where Instagram can go if it maintains this hardline stance on Internet censorship?

Because my favorite thing is to talk to people from all over the world, I meet and listen to people from the U.S. government, the EU, the militaries, Silicon Valley, etc., and I’ve learned that underneath the surface, Facebook and Instagram are genuinely doing quite hard work. When they have to moderate a billion accounts, I can understand why people like me talking about random stuff get caught in the crossfire. I can’t post an image about ISIS without it getting deleted, but ultimately they’re worried about people recruiting for ISIS, you know? I get that they’re using a blunt instrument to prevent the spread of terrorism and disinformation.

I think that what they really don't like is anything to do with sex work, probably due to lobbying from the religious right in America. I think censorship for them is just very simple political maneuvering. You can already see discussions about how non-sexual Meta/Facebook want the metaverse to be. As they're trying to move everybody into a new space, they want to start from a point of zero sex. I don’t see how anybody will want to move to a platform that doesn’t allow for sex. There’s people developing Web3 technology that allows for sex work, so I don’t think Meta will be able to move as far in that direction or grow the audience they want. 

And of course, Instagram wants to be more like TikTok, now the number one most visited website in the world. Their aim is to turn us all into content producers rather than image sharers. I think it’s kind of boring if everyone is just trying to record competing TikToks. But people are so weird and chaotic that you just can't predict anything what’s going to happen with these platforms.

There's a different type of performance on TikTok compared to other places, like Instagram. I feel like if I were to become successful on TikTok, I'd have to perform what has inevitably become the ritual. Performance in a, “Hey, guys! Welcome to my channel!” post-Youtube kind of way. Personally, I much prefer Instagram or Discord because the coded performance rituals there are more to my liking — more nuanced, less formulaic.

It's definitely a bigger conversation about the authentic self and what it means to perform at being yourself. I agree with you — I think that I do have a more authentic self and a more inauthentic self. I notice that when I’m recording or broadcasting, every platform uses its own vernacular. Whenever I start recording myself for Instagram, I want to say, “So,” as the first word. Why the fuck do I want to say that word? Do you know what I mean? As you said, YouTube bloggers become TikTokers, so these fractionalizations of the self, time, and attention take place, and those are further monetized and distributed by algorithms. Is this something we’re going to get bored of? Is there an end point to this fractionalization of the self? Surely the self isn’t infinite. The same can be said for attention spans. Will there be a point where we spend 24 hours each day watching 150,000 half-second clips? No, that’s not going to happen, so it will probably evolve into something else entirely.

This topic makes me think about your project with Arca and Jaco Pesudo, Veilpiercer, where you explore transhumanism, posthumanism, and the making of identity. Do you think using the internet to connect to so many various strangers across the world is a form of transhumanism? In a way, your identity takes on a kaleidoscope, because different individuals receive unique pieces of you when they talk to you online, having never met you in person, which some would say is the more “authentic self.”

I think we’ve inherited this false impression of transhumanism and biocybernetics as one in which you must implant something into your body or drill into your brain. This notion of the skin as a barrier to the self is completely false. The self does not begin and end with the surface of your flesh. Most people continue to believe, “Well, if nothing has intruded itself into my body, if I don’t have a microchip in my arm, if nothing is penetrating the flesh, then I’m not a cyborg.” 

That’s complete bullshit. You don't need your flesh to be touched at all for your sense of self and thought and identity and the way that you operate to be integrated with machinery and network dynamics and all of that stuff.

You mean, like our phones and screens do that for us already?

Yes. And of course there’s the counterargument — “Oh, I can turn off my phone and put it away.” But you fucking won’t. It's almost impossible to be alive as a human being without using this technology, so you’re always decentering yourself to some degree. Unless you are a massive Luddite or a hermit, you will be doing this, and you will be engaged in it.

There's a really good book called The Extreme Self by Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Shumon Basar. They did Age of Earthquakes. I think the book is really interesting and nails concepts of evolution of the self, which the authors call the extreme self.

Which they define as the re-making of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain.

I feel like the prototype for this book because I’m old enough to remember what life was like before everything changed, but I have a degree of self-awareness that younger people lack. I'm at this sweet spot where I've been both an adult with and without the internet. Every other generation either thinks Facebook is going to hack their bank details, or they’re completely brain-melted by TikTok. There’s not much space for a middle ground.

I’m interested in how you see transhumanism converging with biotechnology and environmental design over the next decade. You recently collaborated with scientists Marisa Zuk and Kenneth Robinson on a project for Louis Vuitton’s 200th birthday, coating LV’s luxury trunk with horse blood agar, a bacterial nutrient, and painting the LV pattern with cholera bacteria you engineered to glow using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. You state that the piece represents “the possibility that biotechnology can transform a contagion into an aesthetic medium or tool for future therapeutics.”

Making glowing bacteria for Louis Vuitton is cool, but pointless. It’s just speculative design that won’t change the world or help anyone. It only introduces interesting ideas to a broad audience. I think the coolest application of CRISPR technology will be in the medical treatment of genetic diseases, like genetically-modifying crops in interesting ways, or growing something in the center of the ocean that eats plastics. I get caught up in researching the manufacturing of medical technology and how that will converge with regulation, funding, and academia to lead to more interesting things. I wish I had more of a vision for the future, but I don't really think in those terms. Very little of my brain functions on what is best or most helpful for the world. I focus more on things that are weird and interesting.

But paying attention to weirder things grants insight into what to expect from the future.

Yes, I 100% expect China to invest in genetically engineered superior beings because they have a very different ethical framework than us. And once they start taking that seriously, it’s only a matter of time before technologies that we find horrifying will become acceptable. Just look at facial recognition. I remember when China introduced some of the first bank ATMs that use facial recognition, and how their CCTV cameras in public could read a jaywalker’s face and deduct points from their social credit score. And rightly so, everyone in the West thought that was so intrusive and crazy. But now, you go to the airport and British Airways will scan your face instead of a boarding pass. It’s like, “Well, we’re doing this now.” China paved the way for something horrifying to become acceptable, and now facial recognition happens to all of us. The same will happen with genetic engineering, and before you know it, we’ll all have super soldiers and wooly mammoths and resurrected dinosaurs. And like I said, I want to see new life forms and all this stuff, but I don’t have an answer as to how to make stuff that will really help the world.

I'm in the same boat. I meet so many people who are driven to change the world for the better, but I spend more time focused on the strange and absurd sidebar conversations that make existence worth living. I don’t think that attitude needs to be cynical or depressing. There’s comfort there, because we are all living together through an awesome moment in human history that is super unfamiliar and doesn’t make sense.

Yes, I remember visiting the United States in the ‘90s during the Satanic panic, and turning on the television and realizing that Americans were utterly insane: TV preachers, ritual abuse chat shows, the obsession with abortion clinics. I thought, “This is fucking insane. You people are fucking insane.” But then it kind of got normal for a while, with Clinton and Obama and neoliberalism or whatever. And now, once again, everything is fucking insane. It's such a time to be alive, and I'm so grateful to be alive at this moment. All of that speculative science fiction and fantasy that people obsessed over in the ‘90s is very real now. The stuff that was pure sci-fi is now retro, like how the mobile phones invented by Star Trek are on the way out, and soon everything will just be projected into our eyeballs (which wasn’t something anyone considered or predicted when I was a kid).

The chaos is all so great. Nanotechnology drones, genetic engineering, a woman in Myanmar unaware of the military coup taking place behind her as she performs a TikTok exercise, Twitch streams of Capitol riots. I love watching something like January 6th unfold on the internet in real time because we can see how these massive cultural events become memes. You think that’s an insurrection? No, it’s a meme. An insane meme. What a privilege to be able to witness this mess. 

Is it nihilistic and cynical to be enjoying it? No, because 1) I'm not a bad person and 2) I’m not going to miss out on the joy of this mad shit. Participating in culture is what makes us human. By participating, we create stories and narratives, and that’s what it means to be alive. Even if only one hundred people read this interview, it will affect them and shift their world view in some way because by being here, they’re participating in the process of bringing meaning into the world — finding entertainment. And in this decade, how can you not be fully entertained?